1090. Your hands may be saying more than your words. Lauren Gawne explains how gestures shape communication, how they differ across cultures, and why removing gestures can make your speech less fluent.
1090. Your hands may be saying more than your words. Lauren Gawne explains how gestures shape communication, how they differ across cultures, and why removing gestures can make your speech less fluent.
Lauren Gawne → Superlinguo
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Mignon: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And on these Thursday shows, we talk about things that are just generally interesting about language, and I'm here with Lauren Gawne, who is the co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast. She is a senior lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, and she has a new book out called “Gesture: A Slim Guide,” all about gestures. Those things we don't think about that we do with our hands and other parts of our body too. Lauren, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
Lauren: It is so wonderful to be here.
Mignon: It is so wonderful to have you here. I was like, most of us don't think about gestures, the things that we do. And, and yet they are a really important part of communication. What is it that gesture does while we are trying to communicate with each other?
Lauren: I'm delighted that you are going through the same process that many of my students do when I teach about gesture, which is suddenly becoming hyper aware of your hands and how your head is moving. This is a common side effect of learning about gesture and how it works because we do take it for granted.
And I think especially as a literate society, we are very focused on words and how we put words together. But writing is like a really recent invention. I know we think of smartphones as a recent invention, but in terms of human history, writing has only been around for, you know, a millennia levels of time, whereas spoken language goes back obviously before we have records, because it predates writing by, you know, hundreds of thousands of years. And that means that the way we communicate in person face-to-face, using our whole body has been the default way that humans have communicated for the majority of history, and that involves the words that we use.
That also includes the gestures that we make, and they together create this bigger way of creating meaning.
Mignon: One of the tidbits in the book that I loved is that we gesture differently depending on who we're talking to.
Lauren: Mm-hmm.
Mignon: If you're describing the rules of a board game to someone, you will use gestures differently if they are your collaborator versus your competitor.
Lauren: This is one of my favorite studies because, uh, it kind of gets into the fact that even if we don't consciously think about gesture, we're always thinking about how it can be used effectively in communication. And this is this lovely paper from Autumn Hostetter and her team where we might think, you know, maybe the number of gestures people use is less because they're trying to give their competitor less information, and they found actually they use the same number of gestures.
And what's changing is how much clarity or information is in those gestures. So it's really subtle, the ways that we manipulate our gestures when we're communicating with different audiences.
Mignon: So if you're talking to a competitor, are your gestures, are they bigger? Are they smaller? How are they actually different?
Lauren: They're much smaller. So this was a board game, and they taught one of the participants the rules for the board game. And they said, now you have to teach either a collaborator in the game or a competitor in the game. And when it was a collaborator, the gestures were much larger physically, and they had more detail to them.
Mignon: Oh, that’s so interesting.
Lauren: So you can see how that's gonna be a lot more useful than if your gestures are a bit smaller and less detailed.
Mignon: Yeah. And another interesting thing you pointed out, as you said,we get more self-conscious about our gestures when we realize we're talking about gestures, and the research labs have to fix that when they're doing research so that people actually aren't thinking about their gestures. So they have elusive names and so people don't know they're being researched with respect to their gestures. What are some of the ways that researchers do that?
Lauren: Yeah. I think in some ways gesture research is maybe more prominent in psychology departments than we give it credit for, but it has to be messaged in this way that's called, you know, the Narrative Lab or the Culture and Communication Lab, because as soon as people hear the word gesture, suddenly they get fixated on their hands.
I had this problem once; I was doing a series of interviews with graduate researchers, and one of them knew me and knew my interests, and as soon as I said I wanted to videotape the interview, they were like, "You are doing one of your gesture studies," and then the whole interview, I could see them fixating on their hands and what they were doing.
And so because of this challenge in research, people have had to come up with creative ways to distract participants.
Mignon: I love these stories. How do they keep people from gesturing in studies?
Lauren: Oh, yes. So sometimes we want to change the way people gesture or the access they have to gesture to see, since we know that gesture is such an important part of speech, we can also see what happens when we take gesture away. And there have been all number of ways that researchers have tried to do this while not letting people clue into the fact that they want to see the gestures or the lack of.
And so one study had fake, but like completely real-looking, electrodes placed onto a chair and told people that they were measuring like a lie detector, including like they had cables running into the next room, but they weren't plugged into anything. Another study had this very elaborate garden, like a relaxation chair for your garden.
Clearly that was more within budget than a nice armchair. And they restrained people. This was a very elaborate study because they restrained their legs and their neck and their arms at multiple points. And they told participants that this was a study in ergonomics.
Mignon: Mm-hmm. So they were physically strapped to the chair.
Lauren: Yeah. And then my favorite is the one where they said to participants, "Please just place your hands on the table," which definitely has a much smaller props budget.
Mignon: Right. And did that work as well?
Lauren: It worked as well. All of these studies show, to varying degrees, some amount of reduction in the fluency of speech. So there's something about, gesture and speech working together. And if you take out the gesture, it decreases either the complexity of the sentences that you're using, or your ability to access a wider range of vocabulary. All of the studies found slightly different things because they were using slightly different measures, but they all point to this relationship where if you take away the gesture, the speech suffers.
Mignon: Oh, that's fascinating. So if you can't gesture, in some cases at least, you'll use simpler language or you won't be able to find the right words. Is that right?
Lauren: Yes.
Mignon: That’s so interesting. But also, I think that I feel like I gesture when I can't find a word, almost as though, if I'm looking for a word, my hands will almost be saying, "Wait, wait, gimme a minute. I'm trying to find it."
Lauren: Yeah, that is a really common use of gesture where the best hypothesis we have about that at the moment is that that is your way of flagging to the person that you're talking to. I can see myself doing it now. I'm trying to find exactly the right words, and so I'm kind of bringing the gesture in as a bit of a, like, "Stay with me. I know what I'm doing. I'll get there.” And for a lot of the research, there has been this assumption that it's because your brain needs the gesture to kind of activate, to rummage around and help you find the word. But there has been this really elegant series of studies in a graduate research thesis from Kisa, and they show that it seems like it is much more about the relationship between you and the people that you're speaking to, rather than anything that's happening in your own brain. So again, gesture is a really important part of language, but that is really, really tied to interaction and speaking to people.
Mignon: Yeah, I was surprised people gesture at vastly different rates too. In one small study, some people gestured 10 times more than the other people. Is there anything known about people who gesture more? Are they more fluent? Do they talk faster or something like that, or is it kind of all over the place?
Lauren: I think one of the really fascinating things about studying gesture is that gesture is obligatory in some ways in that we don't yet know of a culture where nobody gestures. But within that very broad generalization that gesture is everywhere, it's not obligatory in terms of making a sentence grammatical.
There are some sentences where, you know, if I say "Look at that over there," a pointing gesture is obviously going to be what helps resolve what "over there" is. But a lot of the time, whether or not I use a gesture and the exact type of gesture that I use is not making a sentence more or less grammatical.
And so that creates that variation where, as you say, you can have half a dozen people prompted to tell the same story using the same experimental methods, and you might get some people that have six or eight gestures and some people that are using 40 gestures in the same narrative span. And sometimes these results about variation in gesture are not what we might think they are or expect them to be.
So one of my favorites is that when we look at the difference between, say, Italian and Spanish, and then French and German, on the other hand, there is a stereotype or an expectation that Italians and Spaniards and people in Southern Europe gesture way more frequently than people from other parts of Europe.
But in multiple studies that have been done, the number of gestures that you see from an Italian person telling a story are more or less the same as what you see from a German speaker. And what differs? The difference is how big the gestures are. So, the German speakers are much more likely to gesture moving from the elbow.
And if you move from the elbow, and I'm very sorry to you if you are on your commute and you are trying to sit there and very subtly just move your hand from the elbow, you're going to have a much smaller range of motion than if you gesture from the shoulder, which is what the Italian speakers in the data were doing more of.
And so what we perceive, what is happening is that the size of the gestures are different, which we seem to perceive as more gestures in terms of frequency. So there is lots of variation across individuals, but also across cultures. But sometimes that variation isn't quite what we expected it to be.
Mignon: Oh, that's fascinating. And I know there was this study about immigrants where the first generation sort of ended up not gesturing like their parents, but gesturing more like, you know, if they were coming to the United States, they'd gesture more like Americans. Is that right?
Lauren: This is a study that is so, so dear to my heart because this is a study from the late thirties, early 1940s. And David Efron was in New York and had access to Super 8 film technology, which was revolutionary at the time in terms of its portability and ability to be used in a variety of conditions.
And part of the reason that we have only seen an explosion in the study of gesture in the last few decades is because it is deeply tied to being able to record it. Gesture is so ephemeral, and this relationship between the evolution of gesture studies and the evolution of available video technology really go hand in hand.
And Efron is one of the earliest; before him, most of the accounts of gesture that we have are very, you know, "I observe that people do this," and "Have you noticed that people use this kind of gesture sometimes?" Whereas he recorded Italian migrants and Lithuanian Jewish migrants to New York, and he recorded, I mean only men, but recorded men outside in social interactions with other men from the same community.
And he measured the number of gestures, but also how people articulated their gestures, whether it was, you know, from the elbows or from the shoulders. He found the Lithuanian men who were more recent migrants tended to gesture kind of straight out in front of their body in a very up-and-down manner.
Whereas the Italian men, when they were gesturing with other people from their community, tended to gesture more from the shoulder, that similar finding to what we saw before. And they tended to gesture outwards from the body left and right more, so they have these different gesture profiles. And then he looked at their sons and grandsons who had become second-generation migrants, grew up speaking, maybe speaking Italian or Yiddish still, but also integrated into American society, American English speakers, and they gestured much more like other American English speakers and much more like each other. And so for Efron, this was really important because he was trying to show that the way that you gesture is part of the language and the social culture that you're brought up in, and it's not something that is intrinsic to you as a person.
Mignon: It's not like a biological thing.
Lauren: No, it's absolutely how you're socialized—the language that you grow up in, the environment that you are raised in. And we as a field of research keep coming back to this early work because it was one of the first times someone said, "What is actually happening moment by moment with the gestures that people use, and how can we use modern recording technology to really answer those questions?"
Mignon: And as opposed to having to bring people into the lab and have them in an artificial environment. That's so great.
Lauren: Or, you know, trying to take a whole bunch of photographs and seeing what happened. So, he also has these absolutely beautiful early 1940s black-and-white illustrations of what's happening from Stuyvesant Van Veen, who was an artist and graphic designer at the time. And they're just so full of personality, and I think that's also part of the real fun of that research.
Mignon: Yeah, and even though it's something that we do to help us communicate with others, it was also fascinating that it's something that we do at some level somehow for ourselves, because we do it when no one's watching.
Lauren: Mm-hmm. So even if you are on the telephone or even if you are recording a voicemail or you're recording a podcast episode where no one is there, there's a very good chance that you are still gesturing, because we are so used to it being tied up with the speech that we use that we can't help but include those gestures in our speech.
Again, they do change. We're always unconsciously thinking about our audience as well. So if you are on a phone call, you may gesture less frequently and your gestures might be smaller. And then most of the research seems to show that the less your audience exists, the less you gesture. There's a pretty good correlation.
So if you are on a phone call, there will be gestures, and there will be slightly fewer if you're recording something for an audience who will hear it in the future. And then there's this nice condition where they were told to just record something and no one will ever listen to it, but it's for their own, you know, chance to practice.
And then there were even fewer gestures. So again, we're always shifting the way we gesture.
Mignon: Oh, interesting. And now we're all doing these video calls. Where does that fall? Is it sort of a middle ground, or do we act as though we're together in person?
Lauren: That's definitely an evolving area of research. Most of what I found about video calls, from research that's been done, is that people in terms of where they look at gesture. So one of the really interesting things is even though we gesture to each other all the time, we still spend the majority of our time looking at each other's faces.
And that's because our eyes are really good at processing motion that happens around the edges of our vision, and the center of our vision is more for detail. So the center of our vision is really good at picking up on those really subtle facial expression differences, and then we can interpret the motion of what's happening with gesture around the edges.
We see even less looking out to the edges at those gestures on video calls. The best predictor of whether your audience is going to look at your gesture on a video call is if you look at it yourself. So if you want someone to pay attention to your gestures, one of the best things you can do is also look at it. There we go.
Mignon: You know, that reminds me of when I was reading your book. I remembered a professor I had in college who would point to things that weren't there. He'd be explaining something like the Krebs cycle; it was a Biology class. He was in front of a whiteboard, and he would point to positions on the whiteboard that were blank, that had nothing on them. We imagined that in the past he had drawn the Krebs cycle on the board so many times. He wasn't super old, but he was an older professor. That he had drawn it on the board so many times that he just thought it was there, and he would point to it as he talked about it. Like, do you see things like that in the research?
Lauren: So it sounds like he had this idea of where these things all fit spatially, which is part of a process of metaphoric gestures. I think, to some extent, that's what's happening there. As I think not just English speakers, but maybe as a broad kind of Western European tradition, we have this idea of concepts and ideas and topics
as bound physical things. We can imagine them existing in space. If you are talking about kind of a project or a topic together, you might both be referring to it. I think of projects as kind of two-handed. If you have this really great idea that you want to share, the idea might kind of be tennis ball-sized, and you can keep referring back to this idea and then maybe have another idea in your other hand as you're weighing up two options for something. But there are lots of other metaphors that we have as well. And your professor's habit of having these ideas in space without necessarily telling you what they are—was that kind of obvious from his speech?
Did you have to go back and figure out what they were, or were you building up a mental model of the Krebs cycle as well?
Mignon: Yeah. I think it was okay. I think we understood, but I think we could see it in our books. I remember thinking like, he didn't write it on the board for us.
Lauren: So he is using a really common discourse strategy that we see in signed languages. So signed languages use the same tools that we use to gesture. They're using the body, they're using the face, they're using the hands and fingers. But they have grammar, just like spoken languages. They have things that are grammatical and ungrammatical and things you need to have to make a sentence fit together.
But just like spoken languages, all of that grammar has such a different function than gesture, so they have gesture and grammar in the same hands, in the same modality. One of the really cool gesture things that sign languages do, that is actually more towards the grammar end, but we use it a little bit.
Once you learn this from sign languages, using it yourself is really effective, is this idea of anchoring who you're talking about or what you're talking about in space. So if I'm talking about the Grammar Girl podcast, I might position it here on my left, and then I can keep talking about the podcast.
I can keep kind of pointing to it or adding things to it in the gesture space, and that stays there as long as this story is happening. And so I feel like your professor is kind of adopting a similar strategy to how signers do extended narrative, which is incredibly charming.
Mignon: That's so interesting, and I was going to ask you about sign language and sort of the difference between signs and gestures, and if there is extra gesturing in sign language.
Lauren: There is. So all of these things about gesture being very flexible, allowing you to show physical features of an item. Each word in sign languages is more or less a sign, and that sign has a fixed form and a fixed meaning, just like a word. We can't start saying "bat" instead of "cat." You have to maintain the same sign, but you can add additional information that is treated much more as gesture.
I mean, it's much easier with spoken languages to be like, this specific bit is speech because it's coming out of someone's mouth and this specific bit is a gesture because it's being done with their hands. Sometimes it's more complicated to pull that apart in signed languages, but that's because they have the benefit of already working in the visual modality, and there's a lot that they can do that spoken languages are kind of a bit second-rate when it comes to maintaining who's doing what in space. It's a vastly superior process to English, where you're like, "And then she told her this," and you're like, "Who? Who is what? What is happening?" Paying attention to who is involved in a narrative in spoken languages can sometimes be a real mess.
Mignon: Yeah. So people who speak sign language are more likely to do something like, "Okay, the Grammar Girl podcast is over here in space on the right and the Lingthusiasm podcast is over here on the left." Then, like, they can always refer to those in the rest of the conversation.
Lauren: Yeah.
Mignon: Is that right?
Lauren: Yes, so you kind of pin them in space and then you maintain them the whole time. You pin them in space with much more consistency than spoken language users of gesture do. And that's kind of the distinction between. Gesture is much less grammatical, much less fixed in that way.
Mignon: And I've heard you say that people who learn sign language change how they gesture a little bit.
Lauren: Yes, there is a little bit of research, but also a lot of anecdotes from friends and colleagues who've learned the sign language of their area. In Australia, our local sign language is Auslan, and that's related to New Zealand sign language and British Sign Language as part of a larger family.
American Sign Language actually is part of the same family as French sign language. So even though in America and Britain it's the same spoken language, they have very different signed traditions and very different, not always mutually understandable, signed languages from completely different language families.
Mignon: Yeah, because of the way the schools for the deaf were originally set up.
Lauren: Yeah, there's lots of really interesting historical reasons for that difference. But people who learn signed languages—there was one study with American Sign Language where even after only one year of undergraduate lessons in ASL, the people who had been doing ASL classes started using those very specific hand shapes.
When you do a sign, your hand has to be in a particular shape, and they would be using those even if they were telling a story to people who didn't know American Sign Language. So it influences gesture in these really subtle and interesting ways, and I - having studied some Auslan - I have definitely found that it influences the way I gesture as well.
Mignon: Oh, very cool. Well, to end up the main segment, the last thing I want to talk about is emoji because you're also very involved in emoji stuff.
Lauren: True.
Mignon: And you have described emoji as a form of gesture.
Lauren: So we have all of these things that gesture does in this really flexible way alongside speech. And when my Lingthusiasm podcast co-host Gretchen McCulloch was putting together the emoji chapter of her book Because Internet, she was trying to come up with, you know, emoji don't have grammar, they don't have fixed meaning. She was like, maybe they're a little bit like gestures. And so she sent me an early draft, and I kind of very politely said, you know, there's this whole gesture literature. I think your instincts are right, but I can tell you exactly why your instincts are right, based on, you know, half a century of research since David Efron looking at how gesture and speech go together.
We sent so many copies of this draft back and forth that we ended up writing a whole academic article, teasing apart and putting together these similarities. And so, when I see the emoji that people use alongside text, I see a lot of parallels with the gestures that people use alongside speech.
And that's because you don't have to add an emoji for something to be grammatical, and there's lots of individual variation, and there's lots of flexibility and playfulness. And emoji are very visual the way that gestures are. So gestures are often giving us visual information about an event or an object.
And so that's how that work began. And it hasn't really stopped since. We've continued, or I've continued at least in my research and research with other collaborators to really tease apart those details and those differences, and also the different functions that emoji have.
Mignon: Yeah. Well, Lauren Gawne. Thank you so much. The new book is "Gesture: A Slim Guide." There's so much more to talk to. In the bonus episode I wanna talk about why you can't point at rainbows.
Lauren: Sure.
Mignon: I wanna talk about gestures in animals and the element of time and how it relates to emoji or gestures. Thank you so much for joining us here. Where can people find you, Lauren?
Lauren: Thanks, Mignon. Uh, you can hear the Lingthusiasm podcast wherever you are listening to this. And I'm on a handful of social media, and I still blog at superlinguo.com.
.Mignon: Fabulous. Thanks so much for being here.